I remember reading a quotation by Bill Bryson stating that there were more 17th century building in the Yorkshire village he was living in than the whole of the US. Now north America saw European settlers from the late 15th century, and they presumably build buildings the same way they did in Europe, so why are there seemingly so few around still? There are rather few Tutor buildings in Britain still, and I guess similarly in the rest of Europe, but even relatively fewer still in the Americas. Am I imagining this or it true and why?
The oldest remaining buildings in the United States (There are many old buildings from the Maya, Aztecs, and other Meso-America Civilizations in North America south of the United States) are pueblo buildings and cliff dwellings in the Southwest, dating from about 750 - 1450.
Elsewhere in the United States, Native American buildings were not made of materials which survived for long periods of time without re-building and maintenance. There are still many mounds, however, left from Cultures inhabiting the Mississippi River valley.
If we are talking about buildings built by European Settlers, (again, in the United States, not in the Caribbean or Mexico), the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, and the San Miguel Mission in Santa Fe were both built in 1610.
The earliest buildings remaining from the first English settlers are the Fairbanks House in Dedham MA, built in 1637 and the John Humphreys House in Swampscott MA, also built in 1637.
Given that the Puritans only arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1628, to have surviving houses built only 9 years later is remarkable.
Generally, the first wave of settlers built small and crude houses. As they prospered, they (or the next generation) pulled these early houses down to build larger and more comfortable homes. For people to have become established enough by only 9 years after settlement to build a house substantial enough that people would want to keep it and still live in it for over 300 years is unusual.
Early houses, throughout the US were also generally built of wood. That was the easily available building material in the new world. Wooden houses can survive a long time, but wooden houses, with open fires for heating and cooking and open flames for illumination, are generally susceptible to fire, so many houses which might have been still useful after hundreds of years burnt down at some point during that long stretch of time.
Some American towns still have quite a few first period houses (pre-1725). Ipswich, Massachusetts has 57 first period houses remaining.
http://www.historicipswich.org/1st-period-houses/
This illustrates another factor which helps to preserve old buildings. Old buildings are preserved best in places that were rich and became poorer. This can be seen in places like Venice, or Bruges.
When the place is wealthy people build well-constructed and substantial buildings. If the place kept getting richer and richer, eventually these buildings might well be torn down to be replaced with more 'modern', or larger, or more impressive structures, or with commercial buildings or skyscrapers rather than colonial houses.
If the place becomes poorer, however, people go on using the sturdy and well built buildings which were constructed in the prosperous past.
This is what happened (in a small way) to Ipswich. In the early days of the Massachusetts Bay colony, there was a tremendous shortage of grass to raise livestock (because New England was covered with forests and almost no grass grew). Ipswich, on the great salt marsh, could graze animals on the marsh. They became prosperous raising cattle and horses for the rest of the towns in the colony. The prosperous settlers built large houses. Later, as elsewhere in Massachusetts forests were cleared and English grass planted, everywhere gained the capability to raise livestock, and the relative wealth of Ipswich slipped away. People did not have the money to replace the fine houses which their wealthy fore-bearers had built, so they continued to use them.
So, the reasons why there are not so many really old buildings in North America are:
Native American buildings were built of materials which did not last a long time (except in the arid Southwest) unless they were maintained, and the disruption of epidemic diseases meant that cultures did not maintain towns and buildings.
Europeans only arrived in the US in the early 1600s, and they did not have the wealth to build substantial buildings for a while after they arrived, nor did they have the population for many decades to be able to build many substantial buildings, and they were confined for at least the first 200 years to a relatively small part of the territory which would eventually become the US.
Early European buildings in the US were mostly made of wood, and were vulnerable to destruction by fire over the centuries.
Early European settlers usually built their buildings in the best locations. As America prospered, these locations were desirable and in demand, and early buildings were often torn down to allow larger and more modern buildings to be built.
So, it's not surprising that places in Europe which have been lived in much longer and had a higher population for most of that time, and which (in some places) built in stone rather than in wood, should have more older buildings.
Still, there are more old buildings in some parts of the US than you might think.